#oneaday Day 832: Brain empty

I'm having one of those evenings where I don't really know what to write. So I tend to find in these situations the best thing to do is just open up an empty page and let the stream-of-consciousness flow. So that's exactly what I'm going to do.

As a reminder that I am not getting any younger, I have been dealing with some nasty back and knee pain ever since we got back from Center Parcs; as of this evening, I think it is subsiding a little, thankfully, but it's been painful to just stand up for the last couple of days, which has not been at all fun, and which has contributed somewhat to my general grumpiness, along with various other factors.

Still, the weekend is nearly here, and I intend to enjoy it. As I have alluded to previously, I intend to get some recording done for the first time in a while, rebooting my Atari A to Z series and bringing my YouTube channel somewhat "back to basics". The Atari stuff is something I care deeply about, and much of my channel is built on it; it makes sense to return to focusing on it somewhat.

I've already lined up the first few games that I want to cover. All of these are, as it happens, games that I've been meaning to give some attention to for a while, but which I've never got around to for one reason or another. If you're curious, since we're starting from "A" again, the first few will be Astro Chase, Batty Builders and Clowns and Balloons, all of which are games I am very fond of and have good memories of from back in the day. I think they'll make good, fun videos.

I haven't looked at ST stuff yet, but I want to get back to that alongside the 8-bit stuff, as the ST also has a great library of thoroughly interesting games — and its longstanding rival, the Amiga, tends to get all the attention from most retro critics and commentators these days. Just like with the Atari 8-bit stuff, it provides an opportunity for me to do something distinctive with my channel — and something which, in the past, has specifically drawn people to my channel.

So I'm looking forward to that. I'm not sure exactly how much I'll get recorded and edited over the weekend, but certainly the 8-bit games listed above are all fairly straightforward, arcade-style affairs, so should be easy enough to make a video of a reasonable length about. It will be good to get back into a rhythm with these; I've been feeling a bit like I've been somewhat creatively "adrift" so far as YouTube is concerned for a while, so renewing my original focus will hopefully be a solid move — for me, at least, regardless of what my audience ends up thinking.

I have wasted a lot of this evening staring at this blog, though, so I'm going to go and play something fun before I go to bed, now. And would you look at that? I managed to get some words out of my head and onto the page. Amazing what your brain can do when you just wind it up and let it go, isn't it?

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 831: Receiving the succ

Today I got sucked off. And by that I mean I had all the wax noisily hoovered out of my ears by a nice lady at Boots.

I'd been dealing with a sporadic issue with my right ear for a while. It started during a holiday a few years back, where Andie and I spent a few days away in Bournemouth. Bournemouth is not far away from where we live, but it is far enough away that it felt like a nice holiday, so we thought we'd just do it. It was nice.

Apart from one day, where I'd spent some time in the pool, got an ear full of water — nothing unusual there, it's happened before — but then, after attempting to empty out the water, my ear was just sort of… stuck. I don't really know exactly what was going in there, but it felt like someone had glued it shut. No amount of wriggling it around, poking it, wanging my hand over it and making farty noises with it and stuffing things into it unblocked it, causing me a not-inconsiderable amount of concern that I might have just suddenly gone deaf.

I had not, in fact, suddenly gone deaf, and the blockage, stickiness, whatever it was, disappeared naturally after a while. But ever since, I have had infrequent episodes of it coming back, usually brought on by sleeping or lying on it. Finally, I decided that I should probably do something about it, and looked into "getting my ears syringed", which is something I knew people had done sometimes, but which didn't sound very pleasant and consequently was something I had been putting off investigating further. (Fun fact: according to Andie, who has had it done in the past, it's actually quite a pleasant experience.)

I discovered during my investigations that one does not simply get one's ears syringed any more. Aside from the fact that apparently you can't just go to your doctor and get it done any more — I increasingly find myself wondering exactly what the police, fire service and medical professionals are actually doing all fucking day these days, with all the things they "don't do any more" — the practice has apparently fallen out of favour, to be replaced with a procedure known as "microsuction". Which is exactly what it sounds like; someone sticks a tube in your ear which sucks really hard, and all the goopy horrible wax comes plopping out a bit at a time.

I went for my initial appointment just before we went away on holiday, and my left ear got cleared out nicely, but my right ear apparently had some hardened, awkwardly positioned wax that was a bit close to my ear drum for the nice lady to go poking and sucking around. As such, she suggested I spend the next week and a bit dribbling olive oil into my ear (it really works, as ridiculous as it sounds) and then come back for the job to get finished. She even only charged me for half the appointment on that first occasion.

Today, I went back for the follow-up appointment, half-expecting the various concoctions I have dribbled into my right ear over the course of the last week and a half to not have had all that much of an effect. But thankfully, they had. And the (different) nice lady who took me through the whole process this time was highly entertaining.

I suspect that she may have been an exorcist in a previous life, because when surveying my lugholes prior to getting the sucking started, she caught herself referring to the "streaks of darkness". Then, while the process was ongoing, she gleefully announced that "the darkness is being released! The darkness is coming!" which I found exceedingly amusing but had to try not to laugh because it's best not to jiggle around too much when someone has a powerful suction device inserted into your head.

Anyway, long story short, all the disgusting goop that was in my ears is now in the revolting receptacle at the base of the machine (bet it's fun emptying that out) and, after the initial temporary mild deafness brought on by the screeching, bubbling sounds of disgusting goop being sucked out of my ears into a machine, hopefully that will prevent any further auditory mischief, at least for the immediate future.

It was £65 for the whole process, which sounds pricy, but the service was helpful, respectful (exorcist-style comments aside) and informative. If you've never had your ears cleaned out by someone who knows what they're doing, I can recommend the experience, particularly if you've ever had a gummed-up weird sticky ear issue like I've had. I am looking forward to (hopefully) not experiencing that again for a while!

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#oneaday Day 830: Home at last

Well, as predicted that was a massive waste of time. Six hour round trip for a one-hour meeting that was of very little value whatsoever. Never mind, it's done with now, and I can start getting back to normality.

After my mini PC unceremoniously died on me on the first day of our holiday, I was waiting to get home in the hope that hooking it back up to its usual setup would sort things out. It did not, sadly, so I ended up ordering another one. Andie and I suspect that some loose screws inside had just shorted something out — likely on the video circuit — and thus it was just bad luck, really. I had heard something rattling around inside the case for ages and had never gotten around to checking it because it hadn't been a problem; I guess it finally was a problem. Whoops. Oh well.

I was hoping that setting up the new one would be a simple case of whipping out the SSD from the old one and putting it in the new one, but nothing involving computers is ever that simple. Doing this booted to Windows seemingly correctly, but with the computer completely refusing to acknowledge the existence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware. After several attempts to fix the problem, I just resigned myself to putting the "new" SSD back in and doing a completely fresh start, then transferring my stuff over from the old SSD as required. It's a minor inconvenience, but easy enough to sort out. After the lengthy process that is setting up a fresh install of Windows 11 (and then "debloating" it) I copied my stuff over, installed the important applications and now the thing is — hopefully, anyway — ready to go for work tomorrow.

Computers are really fucking annoying these days. During the setup process for the new machine, I had to go through multiple two-factor authentication steps, several of which completely refused to work using the most convenient methods. The system continually bugs me for a "passkey", which I cannot be arsed with because I fail to see how it is more secure than the existing security measures. (This is not an invitation to "educate" me.) Then I had to download Office, tell it not to register itself automatically using my Hotmail account and instead use my work account… then sign in to my multiple work accounts, each of which asked me for two-factor authentication multiple times for no apparent reason, and finally we were up and running again.

While I acknowledge that some of the above is due to the cloud-based world we live in these days, and all this nonsense allows us to be able to recover our Stuff much more easily when something happens like the situation I've been dealing with… man, it really makes me miss the days of the Atari 8-bit and ST, when you just turn the thing on and load the software you need from a disk. I'm sure attempting to function normally with a setup like that would present its own pain points today, but with the increasingly inhospitable environment of the modern Internet and the far-ranging splattering of sewage that generative AI has covered everything with, I find myself longing for a somewhat simpler implementation of technology.

Unfortunately, with the work I do — and to a lesser extent, with the life I lead — going back to a life where I could run everything from a computer with one megabyte of RAM and no hard drive is an impossibility.

Technology today is more advanced. But is it really better?

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#oneaday Day 829: The hotel after the holiday

As promised, I am coming to you live from The Broadway Hotel, Letchworth, where I am staying overnight ahead of a Work Thing that I don't think anyone in their right mind is looking forward to.

I am tired, I am grumpy, my back hurts and I just want to be at home in my own bed with my cats, but instead here I am in another hotel room, the same day I returned from holiday, trying to get comfortable on a bed that is weirdly high off the ground.

Still, at least I was fortunate enough to get a room with a bath this time, so I enjoyed a mildly indulgent soak earlier, which was nice. The hotel baths are nicer than our bath at home, so I usually take the opportunity to use them if I have one. Unfortunately not all the rooms have them, so I can never guarantee this will be the case — and the shower-only rooms here appear to have been designed by someone whose understanding of spatial awareness is somewhat different from what one might call "the norm", shall we say.

Also I smelled pretty bad, so I was glad to be able to properly wash off the stench of packing up, going swimming, having lunch, driving home, placating the cats, packing up again then driving for three hours.

Were it not for the last bit, our last official day of holiday would have been very pleasant. We got up in plenty of time to pack up and vacate the lodge ahead of our 10am departure time, but we thought we'd hang around for a little bit before leaving. You're technically allowed to stay until midnight on the day of your departure, you just can't have your accommodation after 10am.

We kicked off our morning of being in limbo between vacating the lodge and leaving the site with a swim. I have been doing a lot of swimming on this holiday, and my aching body today reminded me of this fact, so we took it prettt easy, just having a casual splash around in the main pool, a few times around the slow river and a session in the wave machine.

After that we did something we haven't done before: we thought we'd have a nice meal out at one of the restaurants as a final farewell. We picked Bella Italia, which I know isn't super exciting, but Andie had been working on the assumption that "it's just pasta, which you might as well do at home" until I convinced her to look at the menu and she discovered they do a bunch of other stuff.

Andie had dough balls then a sea bass fillet with veg and buttery potatoes, and I had calamari then a spicy pizza with nduja, roquito sweet chili peppers, red pepper and tomato. It was really good, but I have had humongous farts for the rest of the day. I say "but", when of course I consider this to be a tremendous benefit.

Anyway, the first part of today was a good way to see off our holiday. The latter part has made me grumpy, but I'm trying not to think too hard about that. Tomorrow will be over and done with before I know it, and then hopefully normality can resume.

Oh, and my mini PC was indeed dead dead, so I've had to hastily buy a new one. Fun. That should arrive tomorrow, so aside from not actually having my own computer in the office tomorrow, life should continue with minimal interruptions — and from next weekend, I plan to make a start on my renewed plans for YouTube, so there's that to look forward to.

Anyway, I should probably attempt to sleep amid this cloud of fart gas I currently exist within, so on that note I will bid you a good night.

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#oneaday Day 828: Today is last full day

Dawn of the Final Day, 24 Hours Remain and all that. (Except it's less than 24 hours now by quite a bit, because I'm writing this at 11pm and we go home tomorrow.)

This "re-holiday" has mostly been a success. It's a shame Andie had to be ill for a lot of it and thus spent a lot of her time self-confining herself to the lodgings, but she admitted it was better to be ill in an environment where you have absolutely no commitments or worries than it is to have to stress out over calling in sick to work and all that stuff. I think she's had a mostly good time despite this.

I've definitely had a good time. I've really enjoyed getting out to the pool most days, and we've eaten good food, I finished Super Mario Galaxy (writeup for that coming on MoeGamer at some point in the next week) and generally had a nice relaxing time. I just wish, as I've mentioned a few times already, that I didn't have to come home and then immediately go straight back out again for an unfortunately timed Work Thing that I'm really not all that enthusiastic about. (Nothing to worry about; it's just an HR Thing where they tell us all not to sexually harass one another — not something I'm aware has ever been a problem at our company, but something people apparently need reminding of on a semi-regular basis.)

I'm gutted that I missed the special Evercade Nexus event in London while I was away, but from secondhand reports it sounds like it was a big success. People got to play with Nexii, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and Doom, and it seems everything went down well. Now we have to get our heads down and get these things released next month. Exciting times. I will be glad to put a lot of the stress of these high-profile releases behind us for the most part — but I hope I'm not spoiling too much by saying that we have some equally challenging but immensely worthwhile stuff coming up next year. Nothing has, of course, been announced just yet, but the wheels are already in motion. You might be surprised quite how much work goes into a lot of these releases!

Anyway, I'm talking work when I'm still on holiday, so I'm going to stop that now. I'm going to have a big indulgent glass of milk, then I'm going to get a relatively early night so we can get up at a sensible hour tomorrow morning (compared to our usual rolling out of bed around lunchtime on non-work days) to have a swim, have a nice lunch and then, reluctantly, head for home.

No, it will be nice to be home (for a few hours, in my case) to see my mother-in-law and the cats, who I'm sure have been getting along famously. We've been checking in on the security cameras every so often, and Oliver has, of course, been incredibly sociable, as he always is, and Patti came out from hiding as quickly as she always does when the Nice Old Lady comes to stay and look after them. They will be fine, but they will be happy to see us, I'm sure, and that's always nice.

Right, on that note, I am going to get that aforementioned indulgent glass of milk and head bedwards. Your next thrilling update on this rollercoaster of a blog will be… probably from a hotel room in sunny Letchworth. So look forward to that, I guess.

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#oneaday Day 827: Today is pancakes

Forgive the interruption in posting pattern yesterday, but I just had to have a little rant about the number of people using their phones in the pool. Stop it! Also, I will now stop talking about it, and talk about today, whose main attraction was our traditional visit to The Pancake House.

The Pancake House is a Center Parcs mainstay, I believe — I'm pretty sure there's one at every location, at least here in the UK — and Andie and I always make sure we have a trip there as a special treat.

As the name suggests, The Pancake House specialises in pancakes, and this can be interpreted how you see fit (or what you are in the mood for), as pretty much everything on the menu can be consumed in the form of a large Dutch crepe-style pancake, American buttermilk pancakes, or waffles. (The savoury options can also be had as an omelette if you really want to miss the point of the place.)

There is a large menu consisting of both sweet and savoury options. Weirdly, the "bacon and eggs with maple syrup" is under the "sweet" section, but the "full English breakfast on a pancake, optionally with maple syrup" is in the "savoury" section.

The sweet section is probably mostly what you'd expect — options of various fruit and/or chocolate-based toppings, mostly served with whipped cream and ice cream. Andie went for her "usual", which is an apple crumble-style topping on a Dutch pancake. I, however, decided to go for something different for once; I usually have bacon and eggs with maple syrup on American-style pancakes, but for a change today I thought I would have a sweet option on a Dutch pancake. I went for a "Fruits of the Forest" option, which consisted of a pleasant berry compote, whipped cream and ice cream atop the Dutch pancake. It was good, and surprisingly low in calories (relatively speaking, given some options on the menu are 2000+ calories) at 700-something. So I felt vaguely virtuous eating it, but it was actually really tasty, so I also won. Which was nice.

Had another trip to the pool later in the day today. It was pretty busy, as the weekend crowds are in. I often wonder how busy the place really gets at weekends, as I would think that doing a Friday-Monday "weekend break" here would just feel far too short. Our full week here has already mostly flown by, but I can't say I feel any time has been "wasted" — even the times where we've just been sitting in the lodge with a nice fire roaring, watching Ludwig season 2 or playing Super Mario Galaxy.

The only slight downer on the week is that Andie has been ill for most of it. She feels like she is, at least, getting better, though, having dosed herself up with Lemsip for the last couple of days, and so we're hoping she will be able to have at least a vaguely tolerable day — and a trip to the pool of her own — tomorrow on our last full day before going home on Monday.

Going home is going to be filled with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it will be lovely to see the cats again — and to know that we'll be going home to a house with Oliver in it, unlike last time. But I'm also aware of two potential frustrations on the horizon: firstly, having to determine what the hell is wrong with my mini PC, if anything (I tell you, if it boots up first time when I hook it back up to my monitors back home, we are going to have words) and secondly, having to get home and then almost immediately drive three hours to the office for what promises to be a thrilling day of HR presentations. Can't wait. At least I get another night in a hotel before a complete return to normality, I guess. Still, I'd rather not have to do that massive drive immediately after getting home. It is what it is, though.

On that note, I think it's time to get some sleep ahead of what should hopefully be pleasant day tomorrow, if Andie's nose stops exploding.

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#oneaday Day 826: No-one needs to take their phone into a swimming pool. No-one!

I remember a few years back, the very thought of taking a camera-equipped mobile phone into a swimming pool would have immediately — and quite rightly — branded you as some sort of perverted weirdo. And yet for the last few times Andie and I have been at Center Parcs, we have witnessed the eyeroll-inducing rise in frequency of people who just cannot be away from their black slab of plastic for more than five minutes, and the concurrent increase in prevalence of the waterproof phone lanyard.

Now, I'm sure at least some of the people obsessed with their phones who can't even leave it behind to go swimming think they have some sort of valid reason for bringing it along — be it keeping a record of a family holiday, sharing a video no-one cares about on TikTok or filling up their Google Photos with things that they'll never look at ever again. But I'm also sure I'm not the only one who isn't entirely comfortable with phones being around in an environment where everyone is quite vulnerable due to the fact they're not wearing very much.

And yet this just seems to have sort of… become okay at some point. For pretty much as long as I can remember, those signs next to municipal pools would have "NO PHOTOGRAPHY" as part of the usual "NO DUCKING, NO BOMBING, NO HEAVY PETTING" lineup, but I guess we just… don't care about that any more? Center Parcs' pool does at least have signs saying that photography is strictly prohibited in the changing and shower area, so that's something, I guess, but I still… just don't feel entirely comfortable with this.

To me, it just seems like yet another example of people refusing to just live in the moment without there being some sort of permanent record of it attached to their online profiles. Our brains are amazing things; they can maintain memories of things we loved for a very long time indeed, as I have hopefully demonstrated numerous times on this blog. Hell, I have memories of coming to Center Parcs as a kid that are still incredibly vivid — and I didn't need a camera to keep those memories safe and sound.

I won't be completely hypocritical here; I do often browse back through my Google Photos library, which has become a nice sort of "album" of "what happened when" in many ways — but also at the same time, I know there are times where I will regret having viewed the whole thing on a mobile phone screen. Aside from the fact that I cannot think of a reason why I would actually want to film myself or Andie in the swimming pool, I have always felt that going swimming — particularly if it's at an interesting, fun pool like the ones at Center Parcs — is something best experienced in the moments, and then you carry the memories with you.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe I'm the weird one. Maybe I should just invest in a waterproof phone lanyard and bring my phone into the pool next time.

Nah, I don't think so. I don't want to look like a pervert. And whatever reason people might have for bringing their phones into the pool, I still think they look like perverts. You do not need your phone in the swimming pool. Leave it in your sodding locker like a normal person!

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#oneaday Day 825: Today is quiet

It's been a quiet day today, as we intended. Andie has been feeling a bit under the weather, so she has been taking it easy (she is napping as I type this), but I decided I'd go out and have a swim by myself earlier. It was a good time; I continuously swam (very slowly and poorly, as I do) for 45 minutes without stopping.

It's times like this that I remind myself that swimming really is a rather pleasant way to spend one's time, and that I should probably try and get back into the habit of going to one of the local pools near me. It's good exercise, after all, isn't dependent on the weather, and is something that, while I am consistently fairly poor at it, I do actually rather enjoy when I'm engaging in it.

My trouble is that most of the pools near me have something or other "wrong" or at least offputting about them. The place I used to go in the town centre has changed hands multiple times, and as often happens when this occurs, the general upkeep of the facility as a whole has… not been great. This is probably still my best bet, though.

Out of the others, there's one very close to me that puts me off by the fact that you need 20p to use the lockers and the lockers don't give you your fucking 20p back when you're done. That's right! In an age where pretty much none of us carry around cash any more — let alone pocket change — someone made the bright decision to install lockers that consume your money permanently, rather than your coin effectively acting as a "deposit" that you get back when you leave. There's nothing stopping you bringing your stuff and putting it by the side of the pool while you swim, I guess, but I'm always wary of leaving stuff relatively "unguarded" like that for various reasons — not only because of the risk of someone walking off with it or interfering with it, but also for a staff member thinking it might be a bomb or something. I'm not sure why someone would want to bomb the swimming pool on the former site of a local primary school, but who knows why anyone does anything these days?

My other alternatives are a health club in Portswood that has reviews that vary from "this is the most disgusting place I have ever been in, and I used to drink in Jesters" to "this is an amazing place and you should definitely come here", and a David Lloyd club that is relatively close to where I live, but which charges something like a minimum of £110 per month for an exceedingly basic membership that I probably wouldn't get my money's worth from. The pool there is apparently the best in the area, though; little surprise if no-one can afford to use the fucking thing.

Oh, there's also the university swimming pool, which is actually really nice, but being on a highly active education and community campus, the times when the public can come along and use it are extraordinarily limited. Also it's a bugger to park at the university.

So I dunno. My best bet is probably just sucking it up (not literally) and going back to the one in the town centre, because I'm sure it can't be that bad, surely, can it? I don't know. Only one way to find out, I guess — but not something to worry about right now, since I have a very nice pool just five minutes' walk away for the next few days, so I shall continue to enjoy that at my leisure.

Tomorrow we have no plans. Hopefully Andie will be feeling a bit better by then, but if not, I'm certainly not averse to just relaxing in the lodge as we have been. We've seen squirrels and birds and a wild cat today, so that was nice — and now I'm going to go and play Super Mario Galaxy for the rest of the evening.

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#oneaday Day 824: Today is pool and drinks you can chew

Quiet day today, informed slightly by the fact that I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was going to be sick (I wasn't) and we then slept in until after 1pm. Whoops. Oh well. We are on holiday, and there was nothing we needed to get out of the door for today.

As such, today was a fairly lazy day, though we did make an excursion to the pool, where we spent a pleasant hour and a bit in the warm water of the "Sprudel pool" and its nearby "whirlpool" (actually a jacuzzi) before heading home to have a bit of dinner and pretty much just vegetate on the sofa. Absolutely fine with me. Andie and I are both of a similar mind; a holiday doesn't have to be constantly "doing stuff" — sometimes just being away from your usual surroundings but doing pretty much "normal" things is enough to have a positive effect on your overall wellbeing.

One of the things we've discovered while we are here is a brand of drinks called "Mogu Mogu". I have seen these around before but never tried them, and the ParcMarket (a well-disguised Co-Op) is pushing them hard at the moment. We each tried one flavour yesterday and another today, and we're both big fans.

For the unfamiliar, Mogu Mogu is an Asian (Thai, I believe, though the phrase "mogu mogu" is Japanese) soft drink that consists of a brightly coloured, sugary, fruity drink with lumps of nata de coco floating in it. Nata de coco, if you're unfamiliar, is "coconut gel", or, to put it considerably less appealingly, fermented coconut water.

Now, I won't lie, when I first read the description of these drinks, I wasn't entirely convinced. I was primarily concerned that the presence of something called "coconut gel" would mean that the entire drink tasted of coconut, and while I don't find the flavour of coconut especially offensive (Andie does, meanwhile) I wasn't sure I wanted it in my brightly coloured, sugary, fruity drink.

However, we decided to take a chance — and you know what? They're bloody lovely, they are. Yesterday, I had a bright blue "blackcurrant" one, which reminds one just how inferior sugar-free blackcurrant flavour really is, while Andie had a lychee flavour one, which was a little too floral for my tastes, but she enjoyed it. Today, meanwhile, I had a strawberry one, which was very good, and Andie had a mango one, which was also very tasty.

The present of the nata de coco forms the core gimmick of Mogu Mogu — the Japanese onomatopoeia mogu mogu refers to the act of chewing, and indeed, the fact there are lumps of stuff floating in these drinks mean that with each mouthful you take, you will get a kick of flavour from the liquid part, and be left with a pleasantly chewy part that still tastes of the fruit flavour and not of coconut at all. Nata de coco, it seems, is one of those things that if you bung in something with a strong flavour, it will pretty much just take on the flavour of the thing it is immersed in, making it ideal to provide some things to chew in a drink that markets itself as being… well, a drink you can chew.

The texture of nata de coco is similar to those soft and squishy lumps of pineapple you get in your typical Chinese takeaway sweet and sour sauce, but, as I say, they just taste of whatever flavour drink you got. It's not unpleasant at all, and in a funny way I think it makes you appreciate the drink as a whole a lot more; the very nature of the fact that a mouthful will have both liquid and lumps means that you will tend to take smaller sips rather than guzzling it down in one, allowing you to savour the flavour a bit more than you might otherwise.

Yes, there is a bit of a mental block to get over — and I'm aware that describing a mouthful of this stuff as "having both liquid and lumps" probably isn't helping — but honestly, I was really pleasantly surprised, and we are almost certainly going to try pretty much all of the flavours at least once by the time we depart.

So yeah. That's been today. This has been a good holiday already, and we're kind of still just getting started. Tomorrow we have equally minimal plans, so will probably get up, have some pancakes or waffles (Andie brought a huge bag of mix with her, along with the waffle iron) and then just have another lazy day, perhaps including a dip in the pool again.

Ah, it's so nice to have a do-over on this holiday. And yes, we have been checking in with Oliver via the security cameras while we're away. He seems to be having a lovely time with my mother-in-law, who is giving him lots of attention, treats and playtime. So nothing to worry about there.

Now it's time to head to bed, and perhaps we might even get up before midday tomorrow…

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#oneaday Day 823: Today is spa

As has sort of become "tradition" over the course of our last few holidays at Center Parcs, today we had our day at the Aqua Sana spa. And, as always, it was a thoroughly pleasant experience.

If you've never been to a spa for one reason or another, I highly encourage you to give it a go if the opportunity arises. And, if possible, I recommend going to a proper spa, not a hot shed that a three-star hotel describes as a "sauna".

The Aqua Sana spa here at Center Parcs in Longleat Forest has a number of different "experiences", they call them — they're rooms, really. And each of them very much have their own feel and character.

The centrepiece of the whole thing is a moderately sized circular pool with nice warm water and jacuzzi-style bubbles around about a quarter of the circle's circumference. There's an underwater bench so you can sit in the bubbles, and the rest of the pool is just… sort of there. Andie quite rightly questioned why they didn't just do bubbles all the way around the outside, and I don't really have a good answer for that. Regardless, the pool is a nice stop if you're not sure what to do next, as soaking in warm, bubbly water is always pleasant.

There are a number of saunas and steam rooms scattered throughout the complex. These vary in size, heat, humidity and smell. There's a large what I would describe as a "traditional" sauna, which is just a big hot room with wooden benches, but there are several which are "themed", mostly through the lighting and decor. Our favourite is the "volcanic" sauna, which is dark aside from some red lights at floor height and a feature wall with sort of "crystals" in it. It's a very nice environment to go and be hot in.

There's also a "volcanic" steam room next door to the sauna, which adopts the same stylings, only with more steam and more pleasant smells being piped in. I'm not entirely sure exactly what the smell is, but it's nice, and it sort of sticks to you after you've left, too, meaning for the rest of the day you have the pleasant scent of having been relaxing hovering around you. Better than your usual stench, no doubt.

We actually managed to get into the hot tubs this time around. The last time we came, they were out of order for refurbishment, and the time before that, they were being monopolised by a group of people who had evidently been in there for some time and had no desire to move. A shame, but I wasn't too mad; there are plenty of other things to do around the place, and a hot tub is, on the grand scheme of the other stuff available, relatively mundane.

There are several rooms specifically set aside just to be "relaxation" rooms. There's one with absolutely enormous beds in a nice sort of wicker "cocoon"; there's another that is modelled after a Scandinavian lodge; another that is designed to look like a cave in a forest; and another still where they project an accelerated day-night cycle of the sky onto the ceiling. There's also a room with heated stone beds that are inexplicably comfortable due to how they are contoured to fit the human body and a room with water beds. It's very tempting to just go into one of these rooms and sleep for several hours.

Every room is accompanied by various generic, non-obtrusive music of varying descriptions, ranging from ethereal plinky-plonky piano to what I would describe as solemn Viking battle preparation chants. All in all, it's a very pleasant place to spend a few hours.

And they feed you, too! Today we had the Afternoon Tea, which consisted of some sandwiches, some delicious tiny cakes and a scone with clotted cream and jam, plus a drink. Doesn't sound like much but it's surprisingly filling — and you might be a tad shocked at the calorie count too!

So yeah. It's been a nice day. Nice enough for me to not really be all that bothered that my mini PC appears to be dead — or, at least, is not in a position to be usable while I am away. We'll have a go at diagnosing the problem a little better when we actually get home, but for now, it doesn't matter and I don't really care. Well, I care a bit, it is my work machine and I would rather it wasn't broken, but still. I am in a relaxed, breezy sort of mood rather than stressed out and wanting to repeatedly turn it on and off all evening while getting increasingly irate.

Anyway, it is late now, and I think it is time to take a day of relaxation to its natural conclusion by… well, going to sleep. So that's what I'm going to do.

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